In 2026, the Earth faces an unexpected disaster. A supernova in the nearby Alpha Centauri system has apparently wiped out nearly every electronic component on the planet, leaving human civilization paralyzed. Phones don't work, transportation grinds to a halt, and essential services such as medical care are thrown back into the Stone Age. As the world tries to cope with this technological cut-off, a man dying of cancer begins a journey to save his life and that of his fellow patients, a master criminal escapes a sentence of “judiciary sleep,” a returning Mars expedition faces what looks like certain death, and U.S. president Saul Steinmetz strives to keep his country from falling apart. Author Charles Sheffield has taken a classic hard-SF concept, applied it to the real world, and created a gripping story of survival.

After the Nuclear Spasm in the 21st century, Homo sapiens was extinct, save for a tiny remnant scattered in small, primitive space colonies. At first Solar Humanity had only one goal: survival. But when the battle for existence was won, humankind began moving outward in slow, multi-generation space ships, and as then millennia passed, planet-based civilizations emerged in many star systems. In the year 27,698 A.D, to these new worlds come the Immortals, beings with strange ties to ancient Earth, who seem to live forever, who can travel light years in days — and who use their strange powers to control the existence of ordinary mortals. On the planet Pentecost, a small group sets out to find and challenge the Immortals. But in the search they themselves are changed: as Immortals, they discover a new threat, not just to themselves, but to the galaxy itself.

The discovery of an ancient alien technology known as the Artifacts enables the human race to jump from galaxy to galaxy, but when a strange new Artifact emerges and changes all the other Artifacts, chaos ensues.

The Great War is over and humans have spread across the solar system, but mathematician Alex Ligon’s complex computer model has just predicted that humanity is inexplicably doomed within a century. At the same time, scientist Milly Wu has identified what appears to be an extraterrestrial signal, and the idiosyncratic genius Bat searches for weapons from the Great War to add to his collection, finding much more than he bargained for. Their stories and others are intertwined in this tightly plotted and thoroughly engaging follow-up to Sheffield’s Cold as Ice.

Nebula Award winner Sheffield distinguishes himself as a writer of intelligence, humor, and a pleasing balance of hard science and interesting, engaging characters. Fans will be particularly delighted to renew their acquaintance with Bat, but readers new to Sheffield’s work should take the plunge enthusiastically — this novel easily and gracefully stands alone as a story of people, science, and the puzzles that both can produce.

In the aftermath of the “summertide” that nearly destroyed twin planets of Opal and Quake, a few humans and aliens representing various civilized worlds confront the remnants of an ancient technology and discover a threat to life as they know it. Excitement builds rapidly in this fast-paced sequel to Summertide. Recommended for large libraries.

To the citizens of the planet Erin, the Godspeed Drive is a legendary device from a lost age before the isolation of the Forty Worlds. To teenager Jay Hara, however, it is his one chance to claim his future in deep space—if he can find it. The author of Cold as Ice sets this coming-of-age adventure against the backdrop of a planet struggling in quiet desperation to hold onto the remnants of a dying technology. Despite the high-action content of his plot, Sheffield never slights his characters or his science. A good choice for most sf collections.

Lionel Salkind was a rising musical star. His twin brother, Leo Foss, was a researcher in government work that he couldn’t talk about. Then the helicopter they were flying crashed.

When he woke up, Lionel learned that both he and Leo had sustained fatal injuries, and he was only alive because the surgeon had used organs from Leo to repair Lionel’s slightly less damaged body. More than half of Lionel’s brain was gone, and had been replaced with Leo’s. Lionel, in fact, had become His Brother’s Keeper.

In the 22nd century biofeedback techniques have enabled humans the ultimate expression—the ability to transform the body into any viable form. What began as an innocent technique to reduce anxiety without drugs has raised fundamental questions about what it is to be human. Enter the Humanity Test.

Scheming to get rid of obstacles, Josh Kerrigan’s step-aunt ships him and her autistic step-daughter to Solferino to work for Foodlines. Josh and Dawn join a small training group that is ostensibly doing scientific research and exploration under the watchful eye of the company.

But as the days go by and strange occurrences and mysterious happenings continue, it becomes apparent that something is very wrong and that someone has very different plans for the planet.

Even more importantly, Josh and the other members of the training team realize that they are being lied to about intelligent life existing on the planet and then it becomes a race against time to save those creatures as well as themselves.

A few years after the disappearance of the mysterious Builder Artifacts salted throughout the inhabited regions of the universe, a new phenomenon appears in the unexplored Sagittarian Arm of the galaxy, a force with the power to destroy planets. Capt. Hans Rebka and his team of galactic troubleshooters travel to the threatened Marglot system only to find themselves directly in the path of destruction.

The sky is falling — again. Following up on 1998’s excellent Aftermath, Starfire subjects planet Earth to yet another cosmic blast from the Alpha Centauri supernova. But while the blast that hit Earth in Aftermath simply cooked the Southern hemisphere and knocked out unshielded technology with a flash of gamma rays, this wave promises to do some real damage, with a sleet of trillion-nuclei bundles moving at one-tenth the speed of light.

Warned by the first catastrophe, Earth began building an electromagnetic shield out of the orbiting SkyCity station to divert the incoming apocalypse. But not only will the storm come earlier than expected, the carnage may be worse than anyone imagined — preliminary data shows that the supernova was no accident, and that the wave of particles may in fact be a beam. Crackerjack hard-SF author Charles Sheffield brings back much of the cast of Aftermath for this suspenseful, well-paced follow-up, the two most satisfying returnees being sociopath-savant Oliver Guest and his former patient Seth Parsigian. In the book’s subplot, the brilliant Guest and gruff Parsigian must team up to solve a string of grisly child murders on Sky City that threatens to push the shield project even further behind schedule.

It was just before Summertide, the time when the twin planets, Opal and Quake, would orbit closest to their sun, subjecting both — but Quake in particular — to vast tidal forces. And it was to be the most violent Summertide ever, due to the Grand Conjunction of the system’s stars and planets, something that happened only every 350,000 years.

Access to the unstable Quake was supposed to be prohibited, but some very insistent travelers were determined to make the trip. Professor Darya Lang, who had made a career studying artifacts left by the long-vanished aliens called the Builders, had a hunch that during this unusal Summertide she might find the Builders themselves. Louis Nenda and the Cecropian Atvar H’sial had their own interests in Quake, and would do anything to get there. And Councilor Julius Graves was hunting murderers — if they were hiding on Quake, he needed no one’s permission to search for them.

Planetary Administrators Hans Rebka and Max Perry had no choice but to go to Quake themselves — risking their lives to protect the others — and to learn, just maybe, the secret of Summertide and the Builders…

18th Century Europe: It is an age when superstition is beginning to give way to the force of human reason, and no man so fully embodies the spirit of the times as Dr. Erasmus Darwin. Thinker, healer, and explorer of the bizarre and the seemingly supernatural, no mystery can stand for long against Darwin’s enlightened analysis. And there are far more mysteries than history knows…

For Erasmus Darwin’s world is filled with oddities that most cannot believe: from unknown beings lurking just outside the boundaries of civilization, to anomalies that even the greatest natural philosophers will be hard-pressed to explain, to mysterious deaths that give rise to fears of malevolent sorcery.

And when the renowned Dr. Darwin is called upon to heal a man dying of an ailment that seems impossible, he has no idea that it is the beginning of a quest that will lead him to the darkest corners of Europe, and a stunning encounter with the most famous inhabitant of a certain Scottish loch…

An anthology of stories edited by Esther M. Freisner and Martin Harry Greenberg

In a collection of fantasy stories, warrior women take on pirates invading a charity ball, bring an obnoxious loremaster to justice, protect children from magically-summoned barbarian hordes, and rescue Tokyo from destructive reptiles.

Presenting the space adventures of Arthur Morton McAndrew, space-time expert and scientist extraordinaire, and his long-suffering companion, spaceship skipper Jeanie Roker. Jeanie first met McAndrew on a routine run to Titan and quickly learned he was a genius of the caliber of Newton or Einstein. When McAndrew invented a space drive that let frail humans survive hundreds of gravities of acceleration, he disappeared while testing it, and Jeanie had to find him, using a trail of cryptic messages he had left behind.

That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, in spite of the gray hairs that Jeanie began accumulating as a result of McAndrew’s impractical nature and his talent for getting himself into trouble with much more practical villains, such as…

In the 23rd century, out of all the races of the galaxy, only humanity has discovered the secret of travel between the stars. When a threat to all life arises from non-living cyborgs, suddenly the peculiar human virtues of valor and stubbornness make the despised Earthlings the saviors of all.

Banned from interstellar travel for their aggressiveness, humans have one last chance to regain the stars, provided they can solve the mystery of the disappearance of a pair of alien ships lost somewhere in the unknown part of space known as the Geyser Swirl. This sequel to The Mind Pool continues Sheffield’s far future history of humanity’s attempts to explore the universe. His skill at blending hard science with fast-paced plotting and colorful characters makes this a first-rate SF adventure that belongs in most libraries.

Rob Merlin was the best engineer who had ever lived. That was why "The King of Space" had to have him for the most spectacular construction project ever — even though Rob was a potentially fatal threat to his power…

Thus begins a breakthrough novel by the former President of the American Astronautical Society, about an idea whose time has come: a shimmering bridge between Earth and space that mankind will climb to the stars!

Sound like fantasy? The concept has been in the literature of physics for over three decades, but only a writer with the scientific background of a Sheffield or a Clarke could bring the idea to life.

In The Billion Dollar Boy, rich, spoiled, overweight 15-year-old Shelby Cheever is bored, so he convinces his mother to take him on a space cruise. Without proper preparation, and drunk besides, he accesses the node network alone to visit the Kuiper asteroid belt and finds himself hurtled 27 light years out to the Messina Dust Cloud, where he is rescued by a mining family. On the three-month journey home, Shelby must learn how to do for himself in an environment where his wealth and pampered status mean nothing. Another well-written coming-of-age adventure story in the new Jupiter series. For large sf collections. In the hard-science Tomorrow & Tomorrow, Sheffield explores changes in the solar system and the theory of a closed vs. open system wrapped around a tale of a musician’s fanatical love for his wife. Drake Merlin has his dying wife Ana and himself cryonically frozen so they can be together once a cure for her disease is found. Several times over 15 billion years he is awakened only to find no cure and, one time, he accidentally causes Ana’s death. But if the theory of a closed system is true and the universe shrinks, he and Ana can return to a point when she is alive.

The search for the legendary Builders results in the reemergence of an ancient race of galactic marauders who must be stopped before they reconquer the world in this sequel to Summertide and Divergence.